


Raining ash

by Inky_Scribbles



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Gen, Guns, Hopeful Ending, Hurt Dick Grayson, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Why Did I Write This?, vaguely edited, well.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:28:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22979890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inky_Scribbles/pseuds/Inky_Scribbles
Summary: The air is smoky when you want to die. He doesn't have another way of putting it.///Just yesterday, everything had been perfectly fine. He can barely remember it, anymore. Calm. Normal. He’d rewatched some of his favourite movies just for the sake of it. A Saturday, his day off. Things had been fine.Please read the tags everyone.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Jason Todd
Comments: 14
Kudos: 246





	Raining ash

**Author's Note:**

> i was just listening to random songs on youtube, and then i heard twenty one pilots. and then i am suddenly back in that place, you know? so i wrote this. it was originally not going to have that kind of an ending, not going to lie. this one is bad, you guys.
> 
> Also, this has nothing to do with any of my other batfam fics, just to be clear
> 
> PLEASE dont read this if it will trigger you. stop halfway through if you must. i just needed to get this out because i cant pull my head out from the place its in right now.
> 
> please stay safe, i love you all

Dick stares at the gun.

He doesn’t know how it happened. One moment, he was going through a nostalgia trip on Youtube, listening to all of the songs he used to listen to when he was a teenager and hurting - he’d thought he was in a good place, a better place - and the next.

The next.

Still, he’d gone on patrol. Met up with Red Hood. Busted a drug sale at the docks, the usual type of thing. As normal, before calling the police, they confiscated the weapons the criminals had on hand.

And now Dick is sitting in a chair, holding a gun with the safety off. That’s dangerous.

He can’t bring himself to care.

Just yesterday, everything had been perfectly fine. He can barely remember it, anymore. Calm. Normal. He’d rewatched some of his favourite movies just for the sake of it. A Saturday, his day off. Things had been fine.

He wonders if he should drop the gun. As he thinks it, he rattles it around, listens to the sound it makes when the bullets knock against the barrel; hardly a high end weapon. He wonders how long it would take to die if he put a bullet in his head right now. If it would hurt.

Is he the type of person Clark tries to talk off tall buildings or high bridges? Is he a danger to himself? Would it be a bad thing, if he pulled the trigger right now?

Red Hood sure is taking a long time securing the perimeter. Maybe he actually caught someone trying to sneak away. Maybe that’s the reason he’s taking his time. Or maybe he’s just had enough of Dick’s personality for tonight. He knows that he can be a bit much, sometimes. He knows some people find it irritating. Most of the time, he didn’t mind too much.

He puts a finger to the trigger, imagines the feeling of pulling it.

He pulls the finger off.

He puts it back on, feeling oddly secure when he knows he can choose at any time. He’s in control.

It’s a dark night. The clouds are thick, the lights are off, and the ground is cold. No one’s outside at this time except for the people who don’t want to be, and the people who have some kind of a goal in mind. Still, no amount of darkness stops Dick from hearing when Red Hood enters the warehouse - still overturned and jumbled up from the fight.

“Nightwing.”

Dick almost forgets to respond. “Yes?” He curses the quiet in his voice, the smallness of it. That’s nothing like Nightwing, and it’s nothing like Dick, either. Not the person that Jason knows. He’ll know something is up.

It’s not obvious, especially since Dick hasn’t taken his eyes off the gun since he sat down with it in his lap, but Jason freezes. In his subtle, Jason way. He freezes in the way that his proud posture calms, his chest stills like he’s holding his breath. Dick can’t see his eyes, he can barely see his face from where he’s sitting, but he’s certain that his eyes are darting between the gun and Dick himself (he’s wearing a helmet, anyway. Couldn’t see the eyes even if he was looking).

“Nightwing?” Jason’s voice matches Dick’s in the quiet. It’s a good thing all of the criminals are out cold, or they might overhear. Or maybe interrupt. Or, more likely, they’d interrupt Jason in particular. It’d be real convenient for them to have one less vigilante in Gotham, after all.

“Red Hood,” Dick returns, smoothing out a smudge from the side of the barrel. It gleams smokily in the dull light from the windows outside. Would it be more appropriate to die by a fancier or cleaner gun? He doesn’t know. Doesn’t have the energy to really care.

Jason’s breath catches right before he speaks, like he’s felt a pinch of pain. Dick really hopes he didn’t get hurt in the fight. “What are you doing with that, Nightwing?”

Dick almost laughs. “Repeating my name isn’t going to change anything, you know.”

Red Hood exhales deeply. Dick can’t hear it, but he watches the chestplate of his armour rise and fall for four full seconds each. He takes off his helmet.

Knowing what he’s going for, Dick removes his earpiece, even though it’s technically against protocol. He can’t bring himself to care much beyond the glancing thought of not wanting to get yelled at by Bruce later. Maybe he’d make an exception for this one instance, if Dick got back to the mansion before anything else happened.

“Why are you holding the gun?” Jason’s face is covered by another mask, but when Dick finally raises his head to look, the turn of his lips immediately gives away what he’s feeling. He wonders if Jason would miss having him around.

That’s stupid. Of course he would. They’ve all had rough patches, but everyone at the manor cares about each other. They’d all miss him, probably. And his friends and some of the Justice League, too.

The question, really, is whether or not that’s enough to stop him from doing it.

He still hasn’t decided.

Gently, he pats the gun against his hand. “I think you know.”

“You want to kill yourself.” Something in his voice makes him sound numb.

Yes. “Maybe.” He’s probably a coward for night saying it outright.

From the way his lips wobble, just slightly, before he bites them back into place again, Jason can hear the answer Dick knew inside of himself.

How long had he been like this? Surely there couldn’t have been a flip that just switched, and suddenly he was suicidal. It’s not like he’s been in a great place recently, but he hadn’t thought he’d been this close. Maybe he’d just finally gathered the courage.

“But…” Jason’s tone is calm, his voice is steady. But his face gives him away. Dick wonders if that’s why he wears the helmet. “But what about Tim? And that demon brat. They care about you.”

Dick blinks, slowly. Not in surprise, just allows himself the moment of movement. A blink. Another.

In the distance, disturbed seagulls give off shrill squawks, loud over the sound of the waves breaking against the old concrete of the docks, and further out, the rock armour. It feels like a quiet - a long quiet. The kind that could go on for hours. Days. Months.

It lasts no more than seven seconds. “Would you miss me?”

It’s selfish to ask. He can feel the discomfort of the words roiling in his gut the instant they come out. The anxiety rips into his intestines like blunted forks of steel.

You’d think that Jason is the type to clench his fists when he’s holding back anger, or frustration, or whatever else. Instead, he’s the type to clench his whole body - arms tensing, knees bending, shoulders rising. “Of course I would. What did you think?”

Something in the words feels like the taste of anger - blood, metal, salt. He doesn’t know why he does it, when he raises the gun and puts it to his own temple. It just feels right in the moment. “I don’t know,” he mumbles.

Jason’s breath comes out in a short breath, this time. And then he continues to inhale and exhale in short breaths, in and out, quickly, like he’s just come back from the brink of drowning. “Dick,” he mutters, in between an exhale, voice turning croaky. “Think about what you’re doing. Please.”

Dick does think. He thinks, for the first time since he picked up that gun, that maybe he wouldn’t like to shoot himself in the head if Jason was watching. He doesn’t want to make Jason’s life any harder by giving him more trauma. He’s going to be the one left behind with the living, after all.

“What’s the point?” he asks, and he knows that he’s felt the calm of not quite being in his own body since that damn song entered his head, but now he’s shoved back into his body with no warning. Tears spring to his eyes, stinging like needle pinpricks. “I don’t care anymore.”

He’s too exhausted to do the soul searching necessary to find out if that’s true or not. It feels like it could be, but it might not. Surely, in a life or death situation, he should be going off of more than a could-be or couldn’t-be. He knows that’s what he should be thinking, at least. He doesn’t have the energy to scrounge up the thought, though.

“You don’t care about them?” Jason stays where he is, but the way he’s leaned, Dick can tell where he wants to go. He can tell that Jason wants to leap forward and snatch the gun from his hands. “... You don’t care about us? Aren’t we enough to live for?”

“What’s the point?” He repeats, allowing his eyes to droop just slightly, knowing that Jason can’t see it. “I’m so tired, all the time. Every day. Why do I have to go on, Jason?” Secret identities are out the window for Jason, so it’s the same for Dick. Not like there’s anyone to overhear, anyway. They’d done the perimeter check.

The gun shakes in his hand. The bullets rattle. His breath trembles.

Dick waits for an answer in a quivering, trembling silence. He’s not particularly interested in the answer, he just wants Jason to understand how he feels. What would drive him into this corner, what would pack him in so fiercely, what would crowd him so gravely into this tiny box, to the point where he could burst just to escape.

He wouldn’t mind a lifeline, though. He wouldn’t mind a buoy to keep him afloat long enough to build a boat. Anything, anything.

It won’t come. He can already feel the pulse in his fingers, ready to twitch just enough to release a bullet. He can feel the hope for anything slipping away even as he thinks of buoys and lifelines. He’s been grasping after hope all this time, why will today be any different? 

“I want to see you live,” Jason says, eventually. Dick wonders if this is the point where Jason drums up an inspirational speech where he’s cured of suicidal thoughts. Where his whole body is purged of this fucking ball and chain life. “I want to watch you love people and have people who love you. I want to wake up every day, knowing you’re alive, and knowing that I somehow became one of those fucking people. That’s why you’ve gotta go on. There’s something out there that’s better, and it will come. You don’t have to do this forever.”

“I don’t want to wait that long.”

“Then don’t,” Jason says. He’s as quiet as they were at the beginning of this conversation, but something rumbles deep inside, like a fierce want for Dick to understand. He still doesn’t. “You have to reach for it.”

“I don’t want to.” And maybe that’s just the reality of it. He doesn’t want to have to wade through all of this shit, weighed down by thick slabs of steel attached to stone chains, just to get somewhere that might not even exist.

“I’ll help,” Like it’s as simple as that. But the gun starts to tremble more violently in Dick’s clenched fist, white like bone. “We all will.”

“I don’t want to,” he repeats, voice thick and grungy, but the gun drops back to his lap.

Jason approaches warily, laying his hand over the one holding the gun. “I’ll help,” he repeats, too. Dick’s fist loosens, and Jason gently pries it from his fingers. He isn’t sure when he changed his mind, but it must have happened at some point over the course of this conversation. 

Jason throws the gun onto the pile with the other weapons they’d compiled, then fills Dick’s palms with his own. Somehow, his hands are steady, while Dick’s are quivering something terrible. It feels like their positions have switched.

“We’re going to help you,” Jason says.

“I don’t think I can be helped.”

“You can be.” His fingers twist and hold Dick’s firmly. “I’ll show you. And I’ll stand with you until you believe it, too.”

Maybe, it could happen.

**Author's Note:**

> So. yeah. if that was heavy, please take a moment to take care of yourself.


End file.
